Linkedin Makes Finding Alumni Easy

For years me I’ve been encouraging professionals to connect with alumni from their law schools as well as the universities where they attended undergrad. Linkedin has now made significant changes to the way they organize alumni that make it easier for you to find old colleagues.

The biggest change is that as an alumni of a certain school, you now automatically follow your school. A few years back Linkedin automatically created company pages, now they are automatically creating pages for each school. As long as you spelled your school’s name correctly, you should be following them.

I attended University at Buffalo Law School and now can easily find thousands of alumni, not just those I am connected to or went to school with. Here is an example of my law school alumni page.

If you have a Linkedin premium account, you can drill down right on this page to see where your alumni are now. “Where they work” and “What they do,” your old friend from your study group may now be General Counsel in your backyard. If you don’t have a premium account there is a workaround, simply click on “Network” in the top left corner and choose “Find Alumni” and Linkedin gives everyone a free tool that provides almost all the same information.

By following your Alumni page on Linkedin you can also stay on top of news about your school and be more involved with other alumni in whatever way would be most meaningful to your practice. If you are looking for opportunities to become an adjunct professor or provide service, this is a great way to get reconnected with the school as well.

I’m going to continue to advise most lawyers to join the alumni groups pages as well, these are smaller groups and at times can be very active, but every lawyer should follow their alumni page—it makes it easier for you to stay up-to-date and allows others to find you more easily as well.

The greatest opportunity for lawyers on Linkedin is the most obvious one. Tap into your existing network, re-connect with the people you know in order to generate referrals and new business. Any other ideas for reconnecting with Alumni? Let me know.